HPC NEWS

French forecast is looking good for Bull

The first Bullx supercomputers ordered by the French weather forecasting agency have now been installed at Météo-France's site in Toulouse and will be available for production this year.

Bull says the Météo-France supercomputer is the first fully installed, equipped with the upcoming Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors, based on Ivy Bridge microarchitecture and 22nm manufacturing process. It is also the largest system to rely on the innovative direct liquid cooling technology developed by Bull to lower energy consumption.

Bull and Intel HPC teams have worked closely together to ensure that the new system takes maximum advantage of the architecture of Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors: with a Linpack performance of 500 TFlops, Bull says the system achieves an outstanding efficiency rate of 90 per cent without turbo and a very efficient MFlops/Watt ratio.

Damien Déclat, project director for Bull, said: 'Bull and Intel have been working hand in hand for months to deliver this first Intel Xeon E5-2600 v2 processors-based solution to Météo-France.

'The integration of the new Intel processors within our Bullx DLC blades will allow Météo-France users to complete the transition from vector to scalar technology and to run simulations with outstanding performances on this new generation of system. The transition was greatly facilitated by Bull’s expertise in parallel programming.'